Dave Kellam

Some schools have decided that a D is no longer a passing grade. Apparently, the schools are sick of students just barely scraping by and wanted to raise the standards. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I can’t see it making a whole lot of difference. On the other hand at Queen’s they don’t even bother giving us D’s. The reality is, you’re taking an arbitrary system of judgment along a scale and shifting that scale in one direction. So, all you’ve done is change the arbitrary values that are being awarded. You’re still going to have students that are only doing enough to get by, you’ve just changed how your school is perceived against other arbitrary numerical scales. It makes those schools look worse, but not many schools have a tendency of showing off their mediocre students anyway.

The Incas appear to used a form of binary as their primary form of non-verbal communication. It also appears to be the first three dimensional language. It used a series of knotted ropes that had over 1500 possible permutations.

I’ve been doing workshops all day for the last few days, early ones too. Teaching kids all day wears you out, so I haven’t really been browsing the internet and finding interesting shit to talk about. Here’s a new comprehensive computer programming textbook that you can download as a pdf. It’s a heft nine hundred page read, but it seems to cover a lot of language styles and concepts. I’ve read a little ways into the preface but that’s about it for now.

I’ve finally taken the time to collate all of the old stuff that I’ve done. There’s a bunch of it missing from various hard drive failures over the years, but there’s not a whole lot I can do about it. I designed a front page for it but from there on out I went lazy with directory listings. Without further ado, I present Box.

These wee little bitty things inside me are really kicking my ass. Turns out I actually do have mono, things were looking on the up n’up last week but then my throat decided to get all patch, sore as fuck and leave an opening about the size of dime. It’s a great way to start the summer.

Lets move on to something a little bit more interesting. Here’s an internal memo from Warner Music Group to their employees. The internal memo has a link to a bunch of legal sites or initiatives that they’ve started. The link seems to be down for me, maybe it’s getting a lot of traffic.

You also may want to take this opportunity to consider whether any peer-to-peer services are being used on computers in your home. Please keep in mind that use of peer-to-peer services to download copyrighted material without the consent of the copyright owner, whether in your office or your home, is illegal. It is also unfair to all of the talented individuals (including yourself) who contribute to the creation and marketing of creative works.

The part of that paragraph that made me laugh was the “(including youself)”, aww way to be a team player. That’s pretty much how the memo ends to, it’s great.

There’s seems to be an outbreak of monkeypox in the mid-eastern United States. We should probably issue a health warning and travel ban to prevent the spread of this disease. Apparently, it’s similar to smallpox but not as bad and it actually is named monkeypox. The say that the likely cause were ill prairie dogs that were taken in as family pets. You don’t want the monkeypox.

Update: They are searching for the source of the monkeypox outbreak. The best thing they can come up with right now is an exotic pet dealer in Villa Park, Ind. called Phil’s Pocket Pets. They also have several other best-selling diseased exotic pocket pets like hamster tied to mouse and ball of fuzz.

Here’s an applet for a 4D Rubik’s Cube. The creators also offer some explanation and description of the puzzle and how to solve it. Apparently, there are 1 756 772 880 709 135 843 168 526 079 081 025 059 614 484 630 149 557 651 477 156 021 733 236 798 970 168 550 600 274 887 650 082 354 207 129 600 000 000 000 000 possible states in the 4D cube.

June 4th is the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising. Communism worked great in theory, but doesn’t seem to do all that well in practice (except maybe Cuba; Castro the benevolant dictator). Not that this idea of ‘democracy’ that we’ve had for the last couple hundred years works that much better, but at least we get the illusion of personal freedoms and freedom of speech. I’ll avoid a long rant, Canada’s great to live in, here’s to democracy in China. And here’s a panorama of the square.

I forgot that my school competed for the Stanley Cup in 1906 and 1899, it’s kind of funny really. They never won it, but it shows how things have changed. The ducks have at least made things somewhat interesting, it looked like it was going to be another boring final series. It’s still two teams the are suburban offshoots of major centers… new jersey and anaheim, I’m sorry if that doesnt scream hockey to me. It’s just that I find I watch the hockey playoffs every year until all the Canadian teams are gone and then stop. I guess the suburbanites probably like their teams and support them, they probably just don’t have that rabid Northern hockey thing (although we’ve lost some teams from lack of money).

It’s been an ace week I must say. I picked up some sort of viral infection about 7 days ago, being sick is shitty. The sickness thing is starting to look more like mono, most of the symptoms and it’s lasted longer than most viruses tend to. And my dog died.

It’s kind of a funny way to end a pity paragraph, but it’s even funnier when your dog actually did die. Or more tragic, either way – more pity! Taffey was getting old, she’d been getting progressively worse since last summer, just getting old. Couldn’t run as fast, go as far, jump as high. Then, more breathing problems, blackouts and seizures. Despite that, she was still happy and alert and had the will to live. Pain overtook this week and she was putdown. I’m kind of sad but not too much, it was expected and she gave me years of happiness, a great pet. The cat on the other hand, I’m surprised that it’s lived as long as it has, it seems really stupid sometimes.

The virus makes me want to sleep, i guess that’s why it’s a virus. It leeches all the energy out of you.